Chapter 2
Nora's POV
Five days in Millbrook and I was still counting.
Not days. Locks. I had checked the front door eleven times already today and it was barely four in the afternoon, which was either progress or just a different kind of bad depending on how I looked at it. In the city the last week before I left, the number had climbed past twenty. So eleven was something. I was choosing to call it something.
I had moved here because I could not keep shrinking. That was the most honest way to say it. The apartment in the city had started to feel like a decision I was making every day to make myself smaller and quieter and more invisible, and one morning I had looked at the four walls and thought: this is not surviving. This is just not dying yet. Those are not the same thing.
So I packed two bags, got in my car, and drove until the city was gone.
Millbrook had one main street and a bakery that smelled good in the mornings and an apartment with solid locks and nobody who knew my face. I had been telling myself for five days that this was enough. Some mornings I almost believed it.
Then my phone rang.
It was my old colleague Danny, calling from the newsroom I had not set foot in for eighteen months. He did not say hello. He said: the evidence dropped. An hour ago. It is all over the news and your name is in the first paragraph of every piece that is running. The case is going back to court and they are going to need you and I am sorry, Nora, I really am.
I thanked him. I hung up. I sat on the kitchen floor.
I had known this was coming. I had been watching the case from a distance for weeks, reading every update, tracking the new evidence as it moved through the system. I had told myself I was ready. I had built what felt like a new life in a new town and I had told myself I was ready for the moment it all came back.
I was not ready.
The men who had walked out of that courthouse in their good suits were going to hear my name again. The syndicate behind everything that had happened was going to know exactly where I stood and what I was willing to say. And I was sitting on the kitchen floor of an apartment in a small town that apparently had not been far enough away because they had already texted me four days ago to say enjoy the new town and I still did not know how they had found me that fast.
I sat there until the light through the window changed and then I got up because sitting on the floor was not going to fix anything.
I needed air. I needed to be somewhere that was not inside my own head.
The Millbrook Grind was supposed to close at eight but the lights were still on when I got there at half past and the door was unlocked. I pushed it open and the bell above the door made a small sound and the man behind the counter looked up from where he was wiping down the machine.
He looked at me for a moment. Then he said: I was about to lock up. But I can put something on if you need it.
I said I just needed somewhere to sit that was not my apartment.
He nodded like that made complete sense. He said sit down. He turned back to the machine.
I took the table by the window and put my hands flat on the surface and looked out at the empty main street and breathed. The café was warm and it smelled like coffee and something baked and it was quiet in a way that had no threat in it, just ordinary evening quiet, and I sat there and let my shoulders come down from somewhere near my ears.
He brought a coffee over without asking what I wanted and set it down and went back behind the counter and did not talk to me, which was exactly right.
I drank it. I looked at the street. After a while I said: thank you.
He said: bad day or bad news.
Bad news, I said.
He said: those are harder. Bad days end on their own. Bad news you have to carry somewhere.
I looked at him. He was leaning against the counter with a cloth in his hand and he was not performing sympathy, not doing the thing people did where they tilted their head and softened their voice. He was just saying a true thing and leaving it there.
I said: that is the most accurate description of how this feels that anyone has given me.
He almost smiled. He said: you want another one.
I said yes.
We talked for a while after that. Not about the news or the case or any of the things sitting on my chest. He asked about the apartment and whether the hardware store downstairs was noisy. I asked about the town. He told me the bookstore owner Helen would try to recommend things to me the moment I walked in and I should let her because she was always right. He told me the diner two streets over was the best thing in Millbrook on a cold morning.
He was easy to talk to in the specific way that mattered. He did not try to fix anything. He did not tell me it would be okay. He just sat across from me at the window table after he had flipped the sign on the door to close and talked to me like I was a person and not a problem and by the time the street outside was fully dark I realized I had not thought about the locks once in the past hour.
That had not happened in a very long time.
He walked me back to my building because the street was dark and he said he was going that way anyway, which I was almost certain was not true. At my door I stopped and looked at him and thought about the empty apartment and the news sitting in my phone and the long night ahead of me.
I said: do you want to come up?
He looked at me steadily. He said: "Are you sure?"
I said: I am sure I do not want to be alone tonight and I am sure you are the only person in this town I have talked to for more than five minutes. That is what I am sure about.
He said okay. He said it simply, without making it into anything more than what it was.
We went upstairs.
He was careful with me in a way that did not feel like pity. More like attention. He paid attention the way people paid attention when something mattered to them and I had not been on the receiving end of that in so long it made my chest ache a little. When I needed a moment he gave it. When I stopped needing the moment he was already there.
At some point I stopped thinking about the case and the news and the men in their good suits and I was just there, just in my body, just present in a way I had forgotten was possible.
I fell asleep before midnight for the first time in months.
When I woke up at six the room was pale and quiet and the other side of the bed was empty and cool and I lay there and waited for the hollow feeling that was supposed to come with that.
It did not come.
What came was the smell of coffee.
There was a cup on the nightstand. Still warm. I sat up and picked it up and took a sip and stopped.
He had made it exactly right. The temperature, the ratio, everything. I had not told him how I took my coffee. I had not told anyone in this town.
I held the cup and thought about that for a long time.
Then I heard something outside my front door. A soft sound, like something being set down on the mat.
I put the cup down and got up and went to the peephole and looked out.
Empty hallway.
I unlocked the door and opened it and looked down at the mat.
A photograph. Face down.
My hands were steady when I picked it up, which surprised me. I turned it over.
It was me. Sitting at the café table. Last night. Coffee in front of me, window behind me, completely unaware of whoever had been standing on the pavement outside with a camera pointed at the glass.
I stood in my doorway in the early morning with the photograph in my hand and thought about the text message from day one and the case back in the news and the men who had found my new address in under four days and I thought: they already know where I am. They already know where I sit and when and they have been watching me long enough to print a photograph.
I was not safe here.
I had never been safe here.
And in forty minutes a service dog was arriving at my door and I did not know yet that the wolf coming through it was the only reason I was going to survive the week.
